I was interested in comparing the difference in performance with the Android WiGLE Wi-Fi application with the same settings, same drive and same time on different phones. I did several different runs in car, train and waling in different density Wi-Fi environments to see how they performed in each.

This should allow people to baseline the performance of other phones provided they have one of the three phones used here.

The 3 phones used were a Samsung S7, Cubot C8 (low cost with only 2GHz Wi-Fi) and LG G3.

In general, the number of detected access points is dependent on, acces points being present oviously, and the phone’s performance in:

1. Sensitivity – ability to detect weak signals;

2. Frequency range – not all phones cover all of the channels;

3. Co-channel handling – Some phones are better at resolving signals in the presence of interferers / other signals on the same or adjacent channels;

4. Scan speed – this seems to be crucial especially when moving at speed. How quickly can the device go through all the channels?

Related is the ability of the device to pick-up a GPS signal to correctly tag the correct location.

Clearly the most expensive and most powerful phone out performed the others in all environments.

Although the C8 and L3 got less in all scenarios they did detect networks that the S7 did not, albeit this was low in the 10’s. I also conclude it is not simply the number of phones you have running in parallel but the performance of your best phone that is key.

if I had all the time and phones in the world, I'd love to do comparisons across android releases as well as devices, since there are significant differences in background service and position handling that depend on OS version.

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